6.3.12

As you can see, country is the most "upbeat and conventional" genre
of music. A preference for "upbeat and conventional" music is negatively
correlated with "openness" and positively correlated with
"conscientiousness," and so, as you would then expect, self-described
conservatives tend to like "upbeat and conventional" music (more than
any other kind), while self-described liberals tend to like everything
else better.

Again, those low in "openness" are less likely to visit other
countries, try new kinds of food, take drugs, or buck conventional norms
generally. This would suggest that most conservatives aren't going to
seek and find much intense and meaningful emotion in exotic travel,
hallucinogenic ecstasy, sexual experimentation, or challenging aesthetic
experience. The emotional highlights of the low-openness life are going
to be the type celebrated in "One Boy, One Girl": the moment of falling
in love with "the one," the wedding day, the birth one's children
(though I guess the song is about a surprising ultrasound). More
generally, country music comes again and again to the marvel of
advancing through life's stations, and finds delight in experiencing
traditional familial and social relationships from both sides. Once I
was a girl with a mother, now I'm a mother with a girl. My parents took
care of me, and now I take care of them. I was once a teenage boy
threatened by a girl's gun-loving father, now I'm a gun-loving father
threatening my girl's teenage boy. Etc. And country is full of
assurances that the pleasures of simple, rooted, small-town, lives of
faith are deeper and more abiding than the alternatives.

My conjecture, then, is that country music functions in part to
reinforce in low-openness individuals the idea that life's most
powerful, meaningful emotional experiences are precisely those to which
conservative personalities living conventional lives are most likely to
have access. And it functions as a device to coordinate members of
conservative-minded communities on the incomparable emotional weight of
traditional milestone experiences.